


You're Not Lost - You're Here!

by haloburns



Series: Band Practice [12]
Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, M/M, Murder Cult of Dads, Other, Talking, The Thing That Happened, enjoy, this fic has a weird format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 10:25:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16061168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloburns/pseuds/haloburns
Summary: It was a subject they were planning on avoiding their entire lives. It had been agreed upon seven years ago. It was a known fact. But here they were, in the car, on the way back to Possum Springs.___With the passing of Bea's father, the band has to go back to Possum Springs. And Casey is coming with them. But because of the Black Goat singing to Casey in the past, they want her to understand what happened before. Even if it comes with a price.





	1. Welcome Back!

**Author's Note:**

> quick timeline as a refresh:  
> in this fic it has been:  
> 25 years since casey hartley was killed  
> 24 years since The Thing That Happened (everyone is ~44, LC is 14)  
> 14 years since they adopted LC (everyone was ~30)  
> 8 years since LC got separated from them (everyone was ~36, LC was 6)  
> 7 years since LC first mentioned the singing of the black goat (everyone was ~37, LC was 7)  
> 4 years since LC tried to exorcise her teacher (everyone was ~40, LC was 10)

It looked exactly the same. Nothing had actually changed. The glass factory still haunted the hills in the background. The playground was still dilapidated. The mill was still abandoned.

They drove past the "Welcome to Possum Springs!" sign, right before the bridge, and the atmosphere in the car seemed to change. Everyone knew what this meant, even Casey.

They slowly went past Mae's parents' old house. It had a "FORECLOSED" sign on it. The new family that'd bought it from the Borowski's obviously hadn't been able to keep it long. Which made Mae sad... She'd grown up there. Played, imagined, cried there. Figured a little bit of her life out there. Now... It was just empty.

But life had to move on, right? That was the whole point of life. Moving on, moving forward, changing. Just because Possum Springs never wanted to change didn't mean it never happened. It just happened slowly. Differently. Old jobs were replaced by new ones. New technology improved lives. New people moved in and old people moved out. The kids never came back. But the kids were alright.

Mae looked up from where she had been staring out the window to glance back at Casey. Her eyes flicked down to the journal held in her hands and she smiled a little as she watched her niece/daughter sketch. Dread flooded Mae's body, weighing her down with a sudden, horrible realization when she finally made sense of the shapes Casey was drawing.

  

**_[Welcome to Possum Springs! You're not lost -- You're here!]_ **

 


	2. Best Available Option

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi!!! please read chapter one again! i changed it last minute OOPS - chapter two is now what was chapter one and chapter three is now what chapter two was

**~~A FEW DAYS EARLIER~~**

Bea’s father had been sick for a long time, and they’d visited him in the home in Bright Harbor often. But he’d insisted in his will that he be buried next to his wife in Possum Springs. Things had been rough between Bea and her dad, but she still loved him and she refused to miss his funeral. However, many arguments had ensued the news of his death.

“We can’t take her to Possum Springs! We promised we never would!” Gregg said, pacing back and forth in his and Angus’ room. Mae sits on the bed with a journal in her lap, picking at the cover relentlessly. Bea sits in a chair, staring off into space.

“But LC loved Mr. Santello, we can’t deny her this right to grieve her granddad,” Angus said calmly. Worry threaded itself through his voice, but he knew they would all protect LC from whatever happened. They would not let her disappear from their lives.

“And if she hears the Black Goat again?” Mae asked quietly. “What do we do then?”

Silence hung heavy in the room after Mae spoke. Did they tell her the truth? Did they invalidate what she hears and might see? How do they keep her with them when in Possum Springs without seeming awkward about the reasoning?

“We’ll just play it by ear,” Bea croaked. She’d been crying nonstop for two days, and this was the first thing she’d said since they’d received news. “We’re going, and so is she.”

“Maybe we should give her the story.” The journal Mae had been holding onto was lifted slightly into view. Everyone looked at the rather bland black cover, yellow pages peeking from between the black.

“What?” Gregg said, wiping tears of frustration from his face.

“After we had that first discussion about her visiting Possum Springs, I decided to write down our story anyway. Maybe she’d never visit Possum Springs, but she deserves to know our story at some point. I was hoping for more of an after we died kinda timeline, but when has anything ever worked out for us?”

“What if she hates us?” Gregg asks in a small voice. 

It was the unspoken fear of the four. It was why they never wanted her to know. They had technically killed who knows how many people in that mine. Even though they were apart of a murder cult that had killed their friend, they were still people with families and lives. They all had struggled through the years to justify their actions and come to terms with the results. They thought they had resolved all their issues.

They were wrong.

“Then she hates us. We can’t change what we did.”


	3. The Beginning

They had called a family meeting in the living room, LC sitting on the couch with her guardians scattered about the furniture in front of her. None of them would really look at her. She could feel herself shrinking further and further into herself, turning her recent actions over in her head, wondering what could have gone wrong?

“You’re not in trouble, Casey,” Angus said in his quiet, reassuring tone. Everyone let out a breath after that.

“There are just a few things we need to tell you before we go back to Possum Springs for Granddad’s funeral,” Gregg said slowly. There was no smile on his face, and he sat perfectly still.

But no one was really sure where to start. How did they start something like this?

“Maybe Mae would be the best at this, since she’s the best storyteller?” Bea said tentatively. LC had never heard her use that tone before. Whatever this was, it was serious.

“There’s something you should know about the four of us. And about where we grew up.... It’s best we start from the beginning, like all good stories, yeah?”


	4. What???

_None of us were really great friends, to begin with. Bea and I were friends because of proximity. Gregg and I were friends because we were destructive and it’s fun to be destructive with someone. Angus and I were friends because Gregg and I were friends. Bea was friends with Gregg and Angus because of proximity._

_Possum Springs was an okay place to grow up, really. It was small, safe, friendly. But everyone knew everything you ever did. Which played to my detriment…_

_When I was a junior in high school, I had a breakdown. It wasn’t the kind of breakdown that happened all at once, with tears and screaming. It was slower and less traditional. One day, I noticed the world was only made of shapes. Nothing had meaning. Everything was just_ **shapes** _. Nothing had worth anymore. Nothing_ **meant** _anything._

_It would come and go. Things were fine. I was functioning. But it came while we were playing softball in class and Andy Cullen happened to be in front of me when I snapped. Nothing made sense anymore, and I got angry… And Andy Cullen met my anger at the end of the baseball bat. And it was bad. The whole town knew about it and you could feel everyone judging me, wondering what’s wrong with that Borowski girl… So when college came, I left._

_And I didn’t want to come back. And I didn’t, for almost a year._

* * *

LC shifted on the couch, her eyebrows knit together. “I don’t understand. What does this have to do with Possum Springs and Granddad?” she asked, raising a single eyebrow. When she did that she looked too much like Bea, and it brought a faint smile to Gregg’s face.

“It doesn’t have a lot to do with Granddad, but it has everything to do with Possum Springs. Remember, little towns love to talk,” Bea said gently. “Let Mae finish her story, and then we can talk about what it means for when we go back.”

* * *

_After I left, our friend Casey, the guy we named you after, went missing. It was a really hard time for Gregg. Before me, that was his best friend. The three of us were inseparable. Everyone thought he’d jumped a train and left without saying goodbye… And I wish that had been true. Gods, I wish that were true._

_But in the year I was gone, the old Food Donkey, the glass factory, and the mines all closed. A Ham Panther and a Snack Falcon opened up… But there still weren’t enough jobs. That was the problem with Possum Springs. There were never enough jobs, even though the population never did fluctuate very much. Things weren’t great. Things never were._

_When I came back, they seemed to get worse. Not only was I always exhausted, with never-ending migraines and horrible nightmares every night, there was someone always following me around. I swore it was a ghost, but Bea, Gregg and Angus were convinced otherwise. But that’s not important. What was was that he was following me, and bad things were happening. There was an arm in front of the Clik Clak. I watched a kid get kidnapped on Harfest..._

_And then I met God. And they were_ **rude** _. They told me that nothing mattered because our lives were only seconds to them. It reinforced what I’d been feeling and I just… I hated it. I thought they were right._

_And then we met the cult._

_It was an accident, but it explained so much… We spooked them and they chased us and I fell down a cliff (and survived). And I felt something calling me. This buzzing noise that felt like singing. It was calling me down into the old mines. I stupidly started out by myself, wanting to solve whatever this problem was without my friends getting hurt… But they followed me anyway. Because they loved me._

* * *

Bea squeezed Mae’s hand. They all knew what part was coming up next. None of them had discussed it since that first year and telling their daughter was even harder.

* * *

_We went down into the mines and we found it. It was a cult. They told us they were trying to “protect their own.” There was a hole in the mine… And a bunch of old miners, way back in 1992 found their way in and one of them fell in._

_“_ **_Jim walked right into that hole and never hit bottom_ ** _,” they said. “_ **_Ed called down to Jim. Jim didn’t answer. But something else did_ ** _.”_

_It was the Black Goat. He sings to you, and they never questioned listening to a singing void. They tried to tell us what was wrong, that they were sending jobs overseas, giving money to lazy people and immigrants while they worked themselves to the bone. They were wrong, of course, but this is what they believed as truth._

_“_ **_After that first time, after we picked one out, not only was the town stable, but it was almost like we were getting younger, and money came too. First one into the hole by our own hands… We own up to what we do._ ** _”_

 _They… fed the Black Goat with human sacrifices. They picked people they deemed weren’t gonna be missed. “_ **_Drifters, drunks, and delinquents.”_ **

_They claimed they did Casey a favor by sacrificing him… This cult decided to play god and determine a person’s worth. And killed our friend because they wanted to save our failing city. Instead of letting it die, they killed._

_“_ **_We are not monsters. We do it because we love our home. As long as we keep doing this, Possum Springs survives. This_ ** **can** **_get better. These mines are gonna be humming again someday, old mills puffing smoke. You kids don’t understand that. We lost what our world was built around. Used to be you provided for a family, bought a house. Now you’re just stocking shelves at the grocery store. Kids are leaving more than they're staying. No opportunities here. Old people dying. Houses left empty. Ever seen that? A home become a tumble pile of wood and plaster? A job become a burned out brick box or a hole in the ground?_ **

**_“But we can change that. We can change it. We can put this place back together. Where it just won’t be--”_ **

Shapes.

_They told us all this because they needed new blood to carry on their job of sacrificing people to keep themselves alive. See, they were afraid of dying. So they ate their young. Metaphorically of course. Or maybe literally, in some cases._

_They said if no one was here to take care of this “business” that the weather would become disastrous, the jobs wouldn’t come back, the kids wouldn’t come back. They didn’t understand that their actions had no effect on the world. They were just feeding this…_ **being** _in the hopes that their lives would go back to being the good ole days. But the Sky Cat, God, told me that nothing mattered. And while they meant everything, I realized that our actions have no impact on the universe,_ **those things** _didn’t matter. Relationships and how we lived did._

_Those people were just selfish, terrified of change, terrified of dying. So they listened to a being that begged for blood instead of letting things happen as they should._

_So we left._

* * *

Mae stopped again, tears running down her face. Gregg, Bea, and Angus also had tears on their faces, listening to the retelling of a story they hadn’t thought about in over twenty years. It _hurt_ and Mae almost didn’t want to continue, didn’t want LC to know what they did.

But she deserved to know.

She heard it sing too. Only once that she’d told them, possibly more. Once they’re in Possum Springs, Mae knew it would get worse. None of them wanted her to go on her own to find it.

So Mae continued.

* * *

_There’s a reason we don’t go back to Possum Springs, Casey. Not because we don’t miss it. It is our hometown. But we can’t risk the Black Goat singing to us, trying to draw us in because of its new thirst for blood. And… what happened after we left the cult was pretty bad too…_

_One of the cult members somehow followed us and grabbed me. I kicked him in the head, trying to get away, but the elevator was unstable and it fell. It cut off his arm and caused a cave in… That guy… is probably dead… It’s not like we_ **wanted** _him to die. We were trying to save ourselves…_

_What we want to tell you, Casey, is that we are pretty sure the cult died in that mine. Our friend Germ, that owns the ice cream parlor, closed up the well we crawled out of. There was really no other way out of the mine, we think. We know people went missing in town. People asked a few questions, but overall, nothing came of it._

_We left a year later, unable to stand the singing. And we started our lives here, so we could have good lives, so we could have you. And we hate that those people died. But they killed people and they tried to co-opt us into killing people for their weird idea of what life should be._  
_I think you get taught that you have more control of the world than you do. We walked into this horrible stuff that had already been happening… And it’s really scary, not knowing what’s going to happen. But you can connect things, or maybe connect_ **to** _things. Sometimes you need someone to be the thing you don’t have, even if it’s something you're already supposed to have. Bea, Gregg and Angus are my things. Together, we’re home enough. We should have a home already, a hometown, a physical home. And we kinda do. But not in the same way we have a home with the four of us. They kept me from floating away in that mine. They keep me from floating away now._


	5. The End

“Sorry I didn’t come up with a better ending to all that,” Mae awkwardly laughed. No one met Casey’s eyes, but she inspected each of her guardians as if they were new people. Which they kind of were.

Pops was haggard. His freckles didn’t hide the wrinkles that she had never noticed before. He looked… so sad. She’d seen him look that sad only a few times, when he said he missed Casey. Or when money was tight.

BeaBea was looking out the window, as if she wasn’t fazed by this. Casey knew her a little better than that. BeaBea had the most distinct moral compass out of any of them. She firmly believed in what was right and wrong, whereas Dad was a little more iffy on it, since he didn’t believe in a higher being, and Pops and MaeMae had almost no moral compass sometimes. Led to some interesting discussions about her punishments sometimes.

Dad was weary. His glasses were stained with tears, and he watched Pops with a soft look that spoke of years of love and pain but none of regret. She wanted to look at someone like that someday. Casey wondered if Pops knew just how much Dad loved him.

MaeMae had a resigned, resolute look on her face, like she’d made peace with what happened. That felt weird, that she’d maybe made peace with her actions… But it’d been twenty-four years ago. She probably had made peace. And it’s not like they could change what happened.

Those guys killed their friend and who knows how many other people just to keep some piddly town alive. Yes, it was _their_ town, but who gave them the right to decide who lived and who died? Despite what those people thought, every life had worth. And even if her guardians had killed them, there was a major difference between the two.

“You regret what happened.” It was a fact. She could see it in their faces. She heard it in their stories, their voices. She saw it in their tears. “You wish you could change it.”

“Every day,” Bea said, still staring at nothing outside the window.

“But they didn’t regret what they did, did they? That cult thought it was worth it, that blood was worth it, to keep their town from dying and their kids from leaving. Regret is the difference between you and them. And it means everything to me.”

There was a long silent pause where Casey’s guardians all shared a surprised look.

“So, you don’t hate us?” Gregg asked quietly. Tears made his voice wobbly and they spilled down his cheeks when Casey tackled him, hugging him tightly.

“I could never hate you. It sounds like they were some seriously fucked up dudes, anyway.” Everyone laughed, tears flooding their faces. They didn’t realize how much they were holding back until now, but they felt much better as they all hugged their precious child.

“Is it okay if I ask questions? Like, after I process all of this because. Like, woah. That’s a lot.” Unease rippled through them, but Mae spoke up before the rest of them had a chance.

“Read this first, and then you can ask us questions.” Mae handed Casey a small black journal, yellow pages peeking from between the cardboard covers. Casey flipped open to the front of the journal, and scribbled in Mae’s odd handwriting were the words:

_in the year granddad died_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!!!! i'm back!!! nitw is my go-to game when i go back to college bc i resonate with mae a whole lot, so i started watching the game again, listening to the music, and rereading the rest of the series, and this idea came to me kinda fully formed.
> 
> it seems kinda weird to suddenly tell your child this when it seems like they could probably live their whole life without being told, but with them going back to PS, they felt is was necessary. mae also has a suspicion the black goat is signing to her too, so they feel it's important to give her all the information to make an informed decision, no matter how bad it seemed.
> 
> lmk what you thought!! DO NOT FEAR THERE WILL BE MORE


End file.
